Marquis de Sade

Marquis de Sade, byname of Donatien-Alphonse-François, Comte de Sade, (born June 2, 1740, Paris, France—died December 2, 1814, Charenton, near Paris), French nobleman whose perverse sexual preferences and erotic writings gave rise to the term sadism. His best-known work is the novelJustine (1791).

Heritage and youth

Related to the royal house of Condé, the de Sade family numbered among its ancestors Laure de Noves, whom the 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch immortalized in verse. When the marquis was born at the Condé mansion, his father was away from home on a diplomatic mission. De Sade’s mother, Marie Elénore Maillé de Carman, was a lady-in-waiting to the princesse de Condé.

After early schooling with his uncle, Abbé de Sade of Ebreuil, the marquis continued his studies at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. His aristocratic background entitled him to various ranks in the king’s regiments, and in 1754 he began a military career, which he abandoned in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years’ War. In that year he married the daughter of a high-ranking bourgeois family de robe (“of the magistracy”), the Montreuils. By her he had two sons, Louis-Marie and Donatien-Claude-Armand, and one daughter, Madeleine-Laure.

In the very first months of his marriage he began an affair with an actress, La Beauvoisin, who had had numerous previous protectors. He invited prostitutes to his “little house” at Arcueil and subjected them to various sexual abuses. For this he was imprisoned, on orders of the king, in the fortress of Vincennes. Freed several weeks later, he resumed his life of debauchery and went deeply into debt. In 1768 the first public scandal erupted: the Rose Keller affair.

Rose Keller was a young prostitute he had met on Easter Sunday in Paris. He took her to his house in Arcueil, where he locked her up and abused her sexually. She escaped and related the unnatural acts and brutality to persons in the neighbourhood and showed them her wounds. De Sade was sentenced to the fortress of Pierre-Encise, near Lyon, for his offenses.

After his release he retired to his château of La Coste. In June 1772 he went to Marseille to get some much-needed money. There he engaged his male servant Latour to find him some prostitutes, upon whom the marquis committed his usual sexual excesses. (Meanwhile, at his bidding, Latour engaged in sodomy with him.) The young women helped themselves liberally to the marquis’s pillbox filled with candies that contained the aphrodisiac Spanish fly. When soon thereafter they suffered upset stomachs, they feared they had been poisoned. De Sade and Latour fled to the estates of the king of Sardinia, who had them arrested. The Parlement at Aix sentenced them to death by default and, on September 12, 1772, executed them in effigy. After escaping from the fortress of Miolans, de Sade took refuge in his château at La Coste, rejoining his wife. She became his accomplice and shared his pleasures, until the parents of the neighbourhood boys and girls he had abducted complained to the crown prosecutor. De Sade fled to Italy accompanied by his sister-in-law, the canoness de Launay, who had become his mistress. He returned to La Coste on November 4, 1776. One incident followed another in an atmosphere of continual scandal, and, on his return to Paris, the marquis was arrested and sent to the dungeon of Vincennes on February 13, 1777.

Conditions in this prison were harsh. During his detention de Sade quarreled with his jailer, with the prison director, and with a fellow prisoner, Victor Riqueti, the marquis de Mirabeau, whom he had insulted. He tried to incite the other prisoners to revolt. Visits from his wife, who was eventually allowed to see him, were banned after an episode in which he fell into a fit of jealous rage precipitated by his suspicion that she was about to leave him and was plotting against him. The marquise retired to a convent.

Writings

De Sade overcame his boredom and anger in prison by writing sexually graphic novels and plays. In July 1782 he finished his Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribond (Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man), in which he declared himself an atheist. His letters to his lawyer as well as to his wife combine incisive wit with an implacable spirit of revolt. On February 27, 1784, he was transferred to the Bastille in Paris. On a roll of paper some 12 metres (39 feet) long, he wrote Les 120 Journées de Sodome (One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom), in which he graphically describes numerous varieties of sexual perversion. In 1787 he wrote his most famous work, Les Infortunes de la vertu (an early version of Justine), and in 1788 the novellas, tales, and short stories later published in the volume entitled Les Crimes de l’amour (Crimes of Passion).

A few days before the French Revolutionaries stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, de Sade had shouted through a window, “They are massacring the prisoners; you must come and free them.” He was transferred to the insane asylum at Charenton, where he remained until April 2, 1790.

On his release, de Sade offered several plays to the Comédie-Française as well as to other theatres. Though five of them were accepted, not all of them were performed. Separated from his wife, he lived now with a young actress, the widow Quesnet, and wrote his novels Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu (Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue) and Juliette. In 1792 he became secretary of the Revolutionary Section of Les Piques in Paris, was one of the delegates appointed to visit hospitals in Paris, and wrote several patriotic addresses. During the Reign of Terror he saved the life of his father-in-law, Montreuil, and that of the latter’s wife, even though they had been responsible for his various imprisonments. He gave speeches on behalf of the Revolution but was nevertheless accused of modérantisme (“moderatism”) and mistakenly inscribed on the list of émigrés. He escaped the guillotine by chance the day before the Revolutionary leader Robespierre was overthrown. At the time he was living with the widow Quesnet in conditions of abject poverty.

On March 6, 1801, he was arrested at his publisher’s, where copies of Justine and Juliette were found with notes in his hand and several handwritten manuscripts. Again he was sent to Charenton, where he caused new scandals. His repeated protests had no effect on Napoleon, who saw to it personally that de Sade was deprived of all freedom of movement. Nevertheless, he succeeded in having his plays put on at Charenton, with the inmates themselves as the actors. He began work on an ambitious 10-volume novel, at least two volumes of which were written: Les Journées de Florbelle ou la nature dévoilée (“The Days of Florbelle or Nature Unveiled”). After his death his elder son burned these writings, together with other manuscripts.

His remains were scattered. In his will, drawn up in 1806, he asked that “the traces of my grave disappear from the face of the earth, as I flatter myself that my memory will be effaced from the mind of men.”

Legacy

In the course of a life that scandalized his contemporaries, de Sade lived out many examples of the sexual compulsion on which his works centred. His writings were banned in France until the 1960s. As an author, de Sade is to some an incarnation of absolute evil who advocates the unleashing of instincts even to the point of crime. Others have looked upon him as a champion of total liberation through the satisfaction of his desires in all forms. De Sade’s works were widely read (mostly “underground”) in the 19th century, especially by writers and artists. At the outset of the 20th century, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire helped to establish de Sade’s status in the domain of culture. Today de Sade’s writings can be more comfortably categorized; they belong to the history of ideas and mark an important moment in the history of literature—with de Sade figuring as the first of the modern écrivains maudits (“damned writers”).